
D
anything that requires forebrain thinking stops happening.
Noticing bolt lockback is one of those things because
there’s no reex arc. You have to THINK “Oh, that felt
different, I’m empty,” and that requires a conscious
thought process.
The forebrain is very smart but requires a lot of repeti-
tions to learn. It’s slow and tends to partially shut down
under stress. Much of the goal of training is to move as
much as possible out of the forebrain. For the reght
scene, I classied things by what requires conscious
thought and what doesn’t. Marc,
I decided, has done a fair amount
of force-on-force training. He has
good reexes. So, manipulation
and tactics wouldn’t go out the
window. But things requiring
thought would. Bolt lockback,
holdovers.
Then I tested those against
the clock, and in a shoot house.
While that’s not as stressful as a
ght, and I was primed to think
about certain things, I noticed that
even when I was thinking about
bolt lockback, it was much harder
to notice on the clock. If some-
thing was no harder on the clock,
then I had him breeze through it.
If it was harder, I had him struggle
with it, but just a little bit, because
he is well-trained.
But holdovers are hard. Because
you have to remember, and you
have to make calculations in
your head, under stress. “At this
distance, how much holdover am
I supposed to use?” This problem
is made worse by the fact that
CQC-congured weapons do tend
to have a great height-over-bore
offset between the optic and the barrel. So, I had him
constantly get the holdovers wrong, and put the bullets
lower than he intended, and be frustrated that happened,
time after time.
DT: For someone who’s never been in a reght be-
fore, he does pretty darn well.
DE: I believe that, in many men, there is an innate
drive to prepare for combat. This is irrespective of how
dangerous our environment is normally. Go back millions
of years, you’re a human male living on a savanna, how
often will you be engaged in a tribal war that, if you lose,
then you, and your mate, your children, your parents,
and all your friends, your tribe, are going to die or be en-
slaved? Once a generation? Less? So, the frequency of the
event is low, but the penalty for failure is high. So, what
do we do? When we’re not in the actual event, we take
that time, that opportunity, to train for the event.
Marc makes his living as an asteroid miner. And that’s
a hard job, today’s equivalent would be an oileld rough-
neck. But it’s not a job that’s constant, there are long
periods of time when he’s in port, waiting for the next
job. What does he do during those times? He trains in
unarmed martial arts. He gets in bar ghts and beats the
hell out of people. He competes in the 23rd Century ver-
sion of two-gun matches. He does force-on-force training
when he can. Not that he thinks
the day will ever come, in a reality
where battles are usually fought
between starships, not on starships,
that he’s going to get in a running
reght, on his own ship, against
multiple opponents who also have
guns. But when that actually does
happen, yeah, he does better than
we might expect from someone
who’s never done it before, be-
cause he’s been training for it, for
a large portion of his life.
DT: I did love it, when Marc
hands his pistol over to Miranda,
then, after she’s red it, he tells
her, “Get your nger off the trigger
and outside the trigger guard,
the trigger pulls get a lot shorter
and lighter after the rst shot.”
Obviously, this scene was written
by someone who knows how a
DA/SA auto works, that the trigger
pulls switch from double action
to single action between the rst
and second shot. But I have to ask:
Why did you make Marc’s pistol a
Sphinx? Even by modern standards
that’s a fairly obscure, low-produc-
tion autopistol.
DE: Okay, I will admit that was a bit self-indulgent of
me, but it was a shout-out to my carry gun. I’ll also say,
like the AR and the AK, I think that guns of the basic
CZ-75 pattern are going to be with us for a long, long,
LONG time.
SUMMARY
I don’t know about you, but this is the guy I want writ-
ing gunghts in my science ction novel reading. Theft
of Fire may be purchased through Amazon, in hardback,
paperback, or as an eBook. This is the rst entry in a
planned four-book series. I will be along for the entire
ride, and for anything thereafter showing me those three
little words that mean so much: “by Devon Eriksen.”
More Duane Thomas articles are available for
$5 a month at Patreon.com/DuaneThomas.
Theft of Fire is an excellent science ction
novel, written by a serious shooter who
gets all the gun stuff right.
800-223-4570 • dillonprecision.com
82 Blue Press